GTRI News

Already an established global leader in sensors and radar
research, the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) has taken steps to move
into the medical research space, both in the military and civilian arena.

Retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Shean Phelps joined GTRI’s Human
Systems Integration Division (HSID), part of the Electronic Systems Laboratory
(ELSYS), in March 2011. Subsequently, Phelps was named GTRI Director of Health
Systems Technology Research and Development. In an active-duty career that
spanned more than 30 years, he served both as an enlisted soldier and as an
officer, completing his degrees in biology, chemistry, medicine and public
health.

At GTRI, Phelps is charged with helping to provide guidance and
context to health- and operationally related projects. “My primary
responsibility is to provide oversight to health-related projects and programs
throughout the Institute,” he said. “I’m working with researchers and
scientists to develop technology and insert it into the healthcare realm, with
the goal of increasing efficiency within the industry.”

“Our business is to identify anything we need to change so
that the final product is something that is useful. It is part of my job to
look at these burgeoning technologies and identify that gap: ‘Is this what is
needed?’”

Phelps enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1981. After successfully
making it through the rigorous, two-year Special Forces qualification course,
he spent the entirety of his enlisted military career as a Special Forces non-commissioned
officer. Between 1981 and 1990, he deployed on numerous operations throughout
Africa, Southwest Asia and the Middle East as a weapons and senior medical
specialist, and finally as an Operational Detachment team sergeant before being
selected for the Army’s Green-to-Gold ROTC program at Campbell University at
Buies Creek, N.C.

He completed a bachelor of science in biology and chemistry at
Campbell and subsequently trained at the F. Edward Hebert School of Medicine in
the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, located in Bethesda,
Md., where he earned his medical degree. He completed his residency in family
medicine at Fort Benning in Georgia, and was assigned as commander of the
health clinic at Ray Barracks in Friedberg, Germany, before returning to
Special Forces as the battalion surgeon for 1st Battalion, 10th
Special Forces Group (Airborne), stationed at Panzer Kaserne, Boeblingen,
Germany.

In addition to his tactical and operational duties as the
lead medical officer—an assignment that started on Sept. 11, 2001—Phelps was
designated additional strategic duties as theater surgeon for the entirety of Special
Operations Command-Europe. “I and another officer planned the entire Special
Operations medical strategy for the 2003 invasion of northern Iraq,” he said.
“We handled all of the medical logistics, estimating how much supplies would be
needed, such as water, bandages and medical personnel. We also had to estimate how
many wounded we would receive. In addition to constantly deploying on highly
classified tactical missions, conducting that kind of high-end planning was
really eye-opening and motivating.”

In 2006, Phelps completed his masters of science in public
health, with an emphasis in aviation/space and preventive medicine from the
University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas. He completed his
Aerospace Medicine residency in 2007, and accepted the position as the head of
the Injury Biomechanics Branch and the director of the Warfighter Protection
Division, both located at the Army’s Aeromedical Research Laboratory in Fort
Rucker, Ala.

“I decided to make my way into research,” he said. “I could
be a doctor in the Special Forces and maybe help a hundred or a thousand
people. But if I went into research, I could impact thousands or hundreds of
thousands of people. That made my decision for me.”

“About two years ago, I met Shean at the Medical Technology,
Training and Treatment [MT3] conference in Orlando,” Fain said. “He was talking
about the need for human interaction research in the medical field, and his
current project was specifically warfighter protection.”

After hearing him talk, Fain wanted Phelps’ input on a
project he was working on. “I gave him the abstract on the project, and he must
have stayed up all night looking it over. The next day he wrote up a lengthy
document containing his thoughts, and he wanted to share it with me. It was an
extremely thorough response. I knew then he would be a good fit for GTRI.”

An Institute Direction

As part of Georgia Tech’s strategic plan for its various
units, GTRI’s leadership has been seeking out research in the healthcare space.
Bringing Phelps on, GTRI Deputy Director Tom McDermott says, was one of the
first steps in this direction.

“We have had the initiative for a couple of years now to
grow our work in the healthcare field,” McDermott said. “Part of that is the
credibility an organization attains when medical doctors are part of the team.
So, we had been looking for the opportunity to make a strategic hire.”

Because of Shean’s military background, McDermott says he
was familiar with the core of GTRI’s research. And since he was interested in
continuing medical research, the timing and fit seemed perfect.

Making His Move

As it turned out, Phelps was already considering making some
changes. He already had talked with representatives from two other labs. After meeting Fain, though, he made
the trip to Atlanta and visited GTRI.

“GTRI has a completely different atmosphere than anywhere
else,” he said. “While GTRI is firmly part of the academic world, it also has a
unique, business-friendly environment. I was completely impressed with the
Enterprise Innovation Institute and the Advanced Technology Development
Center.”

But that wasn’t what made him ultimately decide to join
GTRI. “The people sold me on this place, more than anything else,” he said. He
refers to a term he used while serving in the Special Forces: Quiet Professionalism.
“People here are the best at what they do—and they know it. But they’ll never
tell you. There’s no need for them to do so.”

He calls on his military experience, referring to
“operational common sense,” or what is really going to work, the first time,
every time. “My role is to identify problems, help discover the solutions, test
them and then optimize the solutions, in order to put them in the hands of the
users in the shortest time possible,” he said.

Thinking back to his experience in military research and
development, when a new product is introduced to be used, sometimes that
technology was not well or completely thought out prior to the implementation
stage. “You become very good at looking at something and knowing the good and
bad aspects within,” he said. “Sometimes there’s a gulf between the engineers
and the technologists and the operators—physician, soldier or businessman—who
use it or need it.”

Another reason he decided to enter research is because of his
experience with overstated promises in the field of healthcare-related
technologies. “Electronic medical records—EMR—fits this category well,” he
said. “I worked in and around the EMR world for years. The vast majority of the
records are based on technology developed in the 1990s. Why is that? The main
reason is because developers repurposed what was already available. But, this
technology doesn’t offer what is most wanted by the industry: semantic searches
that will create associations the requestor never knew existed.”

“When people talk about healthcare research, they think
‘medical records,’” Phelps said. “Records are very important, but healthcare
research is so much more than that. GTRI and Georgia Tech are so strong in so
many areas—systems engineering, for instance—that we have the ability to be
leaders in this area. There is not a single entity in this organization that
could not have a major impact on healthcare research. My job is to figure out how
to apply the context of that research in the medical space.”

In April 2012, Georgia Tech’s Translational Research
Institute for Biomedical Engineering & Science (TRIBES) appointed Phelps as
its medical director.

Building Alliances

In addition, Phelps has been tasked to build collaborations
with other Georgia-affiliated organizations, such as Emory, Morehouse and the
Shepherd Center for spinal injuries.

Some of the projects that he’s working on include the
following:

Marcus Autism Center Telemedicine Project—GTRI
researchers are optimizing a system so that health care providers can diagnose
and treat autism from a remote location, using Cisco Systems cameras and
monitors.

ArtReach Foundation Project—Phelps is consulting
with the Foundation, which strives to use creative arts therapies to assist
children and adults who suffer Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from war,
violence or natural disasters.

Traumatic Brain Injury Study—Phelps is the co-principal
investigator on a study for the Department of Defense to develop ways of
detecting traumatic brain injury in soldiers.

Warrior 2 Citizen—W2C focuses on helping the
nation’s military re-integrate into life as citizens after serving as warriors.
Phelps is the interim medical officer and medical advisor on the Warrior 2
Citizen Board of Directors.

Emory University’s Progesterone Studies—Phelps
is serving as a military/medical advisor to Emory’s current and proposed
Progesterone-related clinical trials and medical productization efforts

Additionally, Phelps is working to develop and support
multiple tactical and strategic initiatives, such as developing an Integrated
Health Systems Technology program, as well as to promote partnerships both
within and outside of the Georgia Tech/GTRI framework that take advantage of
recent successes (such as the iTrem project) and advances in the use of non-conventional technologies for
medical uses.

He also recently participated in a panel to help strategize
what footprint the medical technology arena will need in the coming two, five
and 10 years in order to conduct cutting-edge work. “We should be working in
areas in which we are already established—sensors are a good example—to achieve
strategic dominance in biomedical science.”

“He has formed the nucleus of a team of people that would be
focused on growing our strategic work associated with health and medical
systems,” McDermott said. “His medical research matched up well with what we
do, and he’s been fairly immediately successful.”

And Phelps credits the Human Interaction Lab with this
process. “That’s what Brad and [GTRI Chief Scientist] Dennis Folds and others
are working on—making technology easy to use. And that should be the benchmark
of medical technology going forward: It needs to be easy to use.”

At the time of the Orlando conference, GTRI conducted a very
small amount of work with the U.S. Army Rapid Equipping Force (REF). Now GTRI
is working with the group, with a multimillion dollar contract award. “I don’t
think we would have much to do with them without Shean,” Fain said. “They have
sent a lot of funding to us because of his background in medicine.”

Phelps is, according to Fain, a genuine fit for
GTRI. “Where else can you find someone who has more than 20 years of Special
Forces experience and is a medical doctor?”